Imam through his famous work "an exposition on Forty Hadith" sheds light on the subject as following:
The prayers and supplications of His chosen servants and the infallible Imams (A) are replete with the confessions of their failure to do justice to the demands of the worship and the service of Lord. While the most perfect of all creatures and the man nearest to God (i.e. the Prophet [S]) utters:
We did not know You as You deserve to be known. We did not worship You as You deserve to be worshipped.
What will others do? Of course, they were aware of His greatness and they knew the relation between the contingent and the Necessary Being perfectly well. They knew that if they spent their lives in His worship, service, and praise, they would not be able to thank Him for His favors, let alone paying the proper tribute due to His Essence and Attributes.
They knew that no thing does possess anything of its own.
Life, power, knowledge and other accomplishments are shadows of His attributes.
Every contingent being is absolutely poor in every respect, a dependent shadow not an independent ‘thing’. What merits does a contingent being possess that it could seek to market them? What power does it possess to make a display of it? They (the Prophet and the Imams) possess the knowledge of God; they have the cognition of His Attributes of beauty and grandeur.
They are the people who have realized, with certainty, their own abjectness, imperfection, and weakness and the perfection of the Necessary Being, through immediate knowledge, Imam Khomeini further explained.
It is we, wretched creatures, whose vision is blotted because of the thick veils of ignorance, folly, neglect, and conceit, and whose faculties of intellect, hearing, sight, and other senses are shrouded with veils of inward and outward sins, who behave with pretensions in front of the Almighty and consider ourselves as independent beings.
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Imam Khomeini stressed actions should be performed for the sake of love of God alone